Your invocation of group selection was completely irrelevant. It’s so irrelevant, I refuse to elaborate. I find it hard to believe you continued reading past the phrase “Williams revolution.” It’s worth pointing out that Tooby explicitly praises Gould’s promotion of group selection.
Punctuated equilibrium was an ad hominem response to an ad hominem attack, so it’s not irrelevant, but it’s pretty tenuously connected.
The problem isn’t that Gould was wrong or over-promoted his own ideas; the problem is that he massively misrepresented the state of the field. The problem is in his popular writing, not his professional writing (though Maynard Smith does mildly criticize them as well).
Barkley Rosser,
oops, I meant “if...weren’t.”
Your invocation of group selection was completely irrelevant. It’s so irrelevant, I refuse to elaborate. I find it hard to believe you continued reading past the phrase “Williams revolution.” It’s worth pointing out that Tooby explicitly praises Gould’s promotion of group selection.
Punctuated equilibrium was an ad hominem response to an ad hominem attack, so it’s not irrelevant, but it’s pretty tenuously connected.
The problem isn’t that Gould was wrong or over-promoted his own ideas; the problem is that he massively misrepresented the state of the field. The problem is in his popular writing, not his professional writing (though Maynard Smith does mildly criticize them as well).